Steve Price tells Podcast Week about live broadcasting with LiSTNR
Steve Price is back in daily radio, joining SCA’s LiSTNR platform as the podcasting network joins the talk radio space, going head-to-head with Nine Radio’s 2GB and 3AW.
Price will host a new daily live-streamed 7am-10am show, to be heard exclusively on the LiSTNR app.
Australia Today with Steve Price is being branded as the country’s first digital audio live-to-air conversation and it launched this week.
Price will share the airwaves with journalist Natarsha Belling who joined LiSTNR last year as the host of the daily breaking news program Your Daily Agenda.
Mediaweek’s Trent Thomas spoke with Price for Podcast Week about his latest career move and what does this innovative new show mean for the radio and podcasting sectors.
Price said that he had been talking to SCA CEO Grant Blackley and SCA chief content officer Dave Cameron for three years with the conversations starting when he was still at 2GB.
“They talked to me about moving over and starting a talk show on one of the DAB+ stations that they have because they felt like they were cannibalising themselves a bit with music on all of those stations so they were going to free one of those up to do talk. And it morphed into a more adventurous proposition when we decided that we would live stream it.”
Price said that one of the appeals of moving to SCA was the company’s decision to follow the Netflix model and put all its audio content through the one digital portal.
“When you consider the number of people that now jump into their car and hit the bluetooth button and listen to podcasts, it just seems to make sense.”
Is this the future of podcasting?
Price said that the reason that he and LiSTNR are doing the show live before breaking it into three smaller podcasts each day, is that it is the future of audio.
“Southern Cross Austereo really deserves a pat on the back for investing in something new. So many media companies these days are cutting costs, sacking people, and finding ways to do things cheaper.”
Asked if he thought his 3AW and 2GB audience would follow him over, Price said that he doesn’t care who the listeners are as long as people tune in.
“The live streaming aspect of this is much more important than the digital station. LiSTNR has been pushing everyone to live stream the program for three hours every day, and our ambition is to get as many people as possible to sign on to that.”
Price said that while Nine has stepped away from national broadcasting and sees its future as live and local, his show is national and accessible.
“We are not out there doing time calls, temperature and traffic or any of those other trademarks of traditional AM radio, that is not of interest to us. People are not listening to us to find out how to avoid an accident or if it’s raining.
“We are a truly national conversation. The program’s DNA is opinion, not news. If there is breaking news, we will talk about it but everything that we do is going to be based around opinion.”
Featuring a broad spectrum of guests
While the first episode featured Tom Tilley and Peter Gleeson, Price said that the show won’t be right or left-leaning, describing it as a broad church.
“I had all types of guests at 2GB and 3AW and I don’t want to pigeonhole the show as being left or right, what we are trying to do is have a common-sense discussion about issues.”
Working with a familiar face
The show will be produced by Thomas Blake who has been a talkback radio producer for 14 years at 2UE and 2GB where he worked with Price for nearly five years.
“He is just a very talented producer and has great contacts. He stresses about the show as much if not more than me.”
Steve Price Off the Record
Price told Podcast Week his new role means that the long-form interview podcast that he launched last year, Steve Price – On the Record, won’t be returning.
“I have gone from leaving 2GB at the end of 2019 to doing vanity projects like On the Record, I like doing those longer-form interviews, but I am now concentrating on the people that pay me.
“I have a five-day-a-week three hours a day radio show, I’m doing a weekly column for the Herald Sun in Melbourne, and I am on The Project twice a week, so I will be concentrating on that from now on.”
[Listen to Australia Today with Steve Price]
ARN release first Neuro Lab research
ARN’s Neuro Lab has released its first piece of research, Sound You Can See. The study was the first of its kind to show how the brain processes radio, podcasting, and music streaming as fundamentally different products, which offer advertisers unique opportunities to promote their brands across each medium.
The research gives advertisers a closer look at how a consumer’s brain responds to different audio formats, as well as what happens when advertising is placed within them.
This first go-to-market piece of research measured attention, engagement, attitude, and memory by mapping brain activity of people engaging with both audio content and advertising. The brain processes radio, podcasting, and music streaming differently and using neuroscience the researchers were able to get an extended view of how listeners connected with the different audio formats by analysing over 40,000 data points every second.
The Sound You Can See research found:
• Radio had an unrivalled ability to engage listeners, and do so for extended periods (60% more neural engagement than other audio formats), keeping the brain ‘on its toes’.
• Podcasting provided an environment primed for high levels of memory encoding.
• Music streaming’s relative strength was creating strong positive attitudes towards brands.
New true-crime podcast Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher
From Diversion Media and iHeartRadio comes a new weekly true-crime podcast series called Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher. Hosted by best-selling author and journalist, Stephan Talty (A Captain’s Duty, The Black Hand), the 12-part anthology series is part spy thriller, part detective case.
Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher is the podcast version of Talty’s latest book, The Good Assassin, and tells the untold story of the secret mission to hunt down a savage, escaped Nazi murderer. Led by a Mossad agent who lost his parents in the Holocaust.
Talty brings the story to life using interviews with the Butcher’s victims, the relatives of the Israeli agents, and ex-spies themselves, revealing for the first time this little-known chapter of Holocaust history and the pulse-pounding undercover operation that brought The Butcher to justice.
The first two episodes were released on April 2, with new episodes going up every Friday.
[Listen to Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher]
The Barefoot Investor’s best
Scott Pape is better known as The Barefoot Investor to the close to 1.7m Australians who have bought a copy of either of his two books. Pape also has the best-selling audiobook in Australia and on April 28, the three-part special Scott Pape’s Money Movement launches on Foxtel.
Pape doesn’t have his own podcast, despite offers from leading platforms, but he is a podcast listener. Just what he listens to was revealed in his newsletter this week.
Here Podcast Week shares some of the series on his list.
Subscribe to The Barefoot Investor newsletter here.
Planet Money
Right now we’re living through a giant monetary experiment of historically low rates and money-printing that affects every one of us — whether we understand it or not. Planet Money does an amazing job of explaining it all in simple terms.
Best episode: ‘Bond Voyage’
Cautionary Tales
Tim Harford is a brilliant economist who writes for The Financial Times in the UK. Yet he’s also worked out what most economists haven’t: most people learn best through stories. Harford’s podcast Cautionary Tales is very good at telling fascinating (and frightening) stories that ultimately help you make better decisions.
Best episode: ‘Buried by the Wall Street Crash’
No Feeling Is Final
Trust me, you haven’t heard a podcast like this. Honor Eastly offers up an audio memoir which takes you to the depths of her depression and subsequent psychiatric hospitalisation. It’s raw, heartfelt and addictive. It’s not the easiest thing to listen to, but that’s the point.
Best episode: All of them. There are some rude words, though, so you don’t want to play it in the car with the kids.
Adam Liaw enjoyed his taste of Podcasting
Last year Adam Liaw hosted a six-part podcast series called Adjust The Contrast. Created by mortgage aggregator FAST Group and The Royals, Adjust The Contrast explored diversity from all angles and made the case for how diversity impacts organisations.
Mediaweek’s Tess Connery spoke to Liaw for Podcast Week about his experience hosting the show, and whether he’d be open to working on another podcast like that.
“I really enjoyed the process of making that with FAST and the whole team at The Royals who helped put that together. It was really a fascinating discussion on diversity and the benefits of diversity. I think diversity is a subject that people hear about an awful lot but we often don’t look at it in terms of the benefit it can bring to an organsation. So that was really the focus for Adjust The Contrast. I thought the guests that we had – everyone from Elizabeth Broderick to Tanya Hosch – really helped me to clarify my understanding of how diversity can be useful to organisations.
“I’d love to do more of something like that, it was a really fascinating project that I think a lot of people got a lot of benefit from.”
Ken Sutcliffe discusses his life and career on the Trailblazers Podcast
The latest episode of the Trailblazers Podcast with Tim Gilbert gives an insight into TV host Ken Sutcliffe’s life and career.
Gilber and Sutcliffe discussed his 50-year media career, his childhood growing up in Mudgee, his retirement in 2016, and how he overcame being a shy kid to become an iconic TV personality.
“Most people don’t get to enjoy their whole working life like I did. I did more than I ever thought was possible,” Sutcliffe explained.
From modest beginnings in the central-western New South Wales town of Mudgee, Sutcliffe talks about his rejections early on in radio, and how it led him to apprentice as a barber, which is where he learned to converse with people from all walks of life. Sutcliffe honed his skills in regional radio and television before joining the Nine Network in 1979.
[Listen to Trailblazers with Tim Gilbert here]
Spotify Podcast Ads now available in Australia
Spotify is creating a new way for advertisers to make the most of podcasting and providing an opportunity to reach valuable and engaged audiences, with the announcement that Spotify Podcast Ads are now available in Australia.
Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy of traditional podcast ads, with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing. Powered by proprietary Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI) technology, which Spotify announced in 2020, Spotify Podcast Ads deliver and report on confirmed ad impressions rather than downloads, as well as reach and frequency, and with this new level of digital insight, advertisers are equipped to make even more data-driven decisions for their podcast campaigns.
Historically, a lack of clear and equivalent measurement has prevented podcast advertising from truly taking off like its digital media counterparts. This is because podcast content is still largely downloaded via RSS feeds — which limits the advertiser’s visibility into whether their ad was actually heard. But the shift in consumption from downloads to streaming has opened the door for advances in data-driven podcast advertising.
Advertisers can purchase Spotify Podcast Ads on a title-by-title basis – running their creative across preroll, midroll, or postroll ad placements within the show’s episodes. Select hosts across these shows, as well as a network of professional voice talent, can also team up with advertisers to help bring their podcast creative to life on Spotify.
Audioboom Partners with Mapp Media
Audioboom has announced a strategic partnership with MAPP Media to expand podcast monetization in the UK. MAPP Media will monetize Audioboom’s impression-based inventory, delivering new value through scaled Dynamic Ad Insertion opportunities to a portfolio of more than 8000 podcasts.
MAPP Media’s sales platform will deliver revenue through a second window sales model, while Audioboom’s in-house team will continue to focus on the premium model of high engagement, embedded, host reads. The combined strategy will optimise advertising revenue and create maximum value for Audioboom’s original podcasts and production partners.
